How The Italians Changed Opera Forever

How The Italians Changed Opera Forever

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Several Florentine musicians and intellectuals, la camerata fiorentina, were fascinated with Ancient Greece and opposed to the surpluses of Renaissance polyphonic music.

At the first operas, the purpose was to make music subservient to the terms. After Florence and Rome, Venice quickly became the center of opera, where the first industrial opera house opened in 1637, hence making the art form available to a broader public.

Opera shortly spread through Europe, and in 1700 Naples, Vienna, Paris and London were important operatic centers. Opera seria, or serious opera, was similar to tragedy and frequently inspired from mythology. On the flip side, the comic opera buffastaged regular characters and dealt with light topics.
An example of this kind, which appeared at the start of the eighteenth century, was Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Whereas the first operas endeavoured to emphasize the terms, the ending of the baroque period was that of good bel canto melodies. In response, a more simple style wherein text and music were more strongly allied, boom from the end of the eighteenth century.

In classical operas, sing served the remarkable idea, not the reverse. Christoph Willibald Gluck pioneered this reform which then affected many composers. The romantic era started with the functions of the German composer Carl Maria von Weber.
The genre mixed serious and comic opera traits, consuming facets of symphonic music, with subjects drawn from modern life and latest history. Wagner collected music, drama, poetry and staging in what he called music drama’.

In his operas, the orchestra became part of the history, and he commonly used the leitmotiv, a musical phrase connected with a personality, an event or a concept. The bel canto tradition went on, along with opera buffa characters and themes. Giuseppe Verdi was the last excellent Italian composer of the nineteenth century.